Eds. Swen Steinberg and Helga Schreckenberger, Environments of Exile: Nature, Refugees, and Representations, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, 2025.
Forced migration and escape always takes place in specific cultural, social, and political environments, but also in natural ones: natural disasters and conservation trigger migration. At the same time, escape takes place in nature—when people hide in forests, flee across unguarded “green” borders, or cannot reach safety behind oceans or mountains. Migration brings people into different climates or in climate zones they are not familiar with. This movement affected survival in several ways, because specific knowledge about nature and the environment influences flight and exile, the conditions of survival in nature (shelter, food, health), and the possibilities of arrival and integration, for example, through specific knowledge about nature in agriculture, mining, or forestry. Consequently, exiles and refugees have had an impact on the environment, as well as their knowledge about nature purposefully ignored or suppressed. Furthermore, natural spaces, especially at borders, were places of resistance to persecution and oppression; here, nature became a political space where knowledge circulation took place, and relief was organized. Finally, exile and environment are also related to identity transformation or conservation. These processes can be reconstructed in memories as well as in artistic representation about environments of exile.
When we prepared for the 2020 conference (that was then postponed into a 2021 online conference due to COVID), we had already started following debates about the human right to landscape (Egoz/Mahkzoumi/Pungetti 2011) and approaches in the environmental history of modern migrations (Amiero/Tucker 2017). We extended these ideas to historical perspectives on forced migration: to spatiality and temporalities of environments in contexts of escape and exile in the first half of the 20th century and focused, in particular, on the flight from Nazi-occupied Europe. How did people prepare for and resonate with the new natural environment they were forced into?
Our volume presents ten articles, geographically spanning from Europe, the US and Canada to Brazil, Kenya, and Palestine. They are based on a wide array of sources, including autobiographical publications and oral history as well as art in writing, photography, and painting. They analyze climate related challenges refugees have been (and still are) confronted with; they question the settler-colonial contexts refugees from Nazi persecution in Central Europe arrived in, for example in the Americas or Africa; and they address knowledge about nature in the transit situation of forced migration—bodies of mobile knowledge about the environment between translation and ignorance.
Even though we present a more historical and literary studies-inspired perspective, refugees and the environment continue to be at the center of global migration today; climate change will probably be the main cause of mobility in the next decade.
Why is this topic (and, of course, the book) so important to me? Even though we present a more historical and literary studies-inspired perspective, refugees and the environment continue to be at the center of global migration today; climate change will probably be the main cause of mobility in the next decade. Even though our volume cannot solve this pressing migration issue, it introduces coping mechanisms after “arrival” from a historical perspective and through the individual lens of refugees in the 1930s and 40s. And what happens when people are forced to other places in the world—and not just into new political, cultural, or social environments, but also new natural environments of exile.
Feature Image: A refugee returning home. 10 July 1944. Caen, France. Credit: Michael M. Dean / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-162662/
Swen Steinberg